The practice of law, although it is a learned profession, is also a business.
Like any business, its professionals need to market themselves to attract clients: as anyone can tell you, there is no shortage of lawyers out there. They all compete for a limited amount of customer dollars, and many of them offer substantially similar services. As a result, alongside the predatory lawyer sharks swim the marketing remora fish, competing for a limited amount of lawyer marketing spend.
Naturally, as marketers know and encourage, lawyers seek to differentiate themselves from one another; improve their position in the marketing “pecking order” with a view to increasing their market share.
Marketers have discovered an effective way to appeal to the archetypal superiority complex of self-respecting lawyers. They encourage those attorneys to seek out surveys that give some of them superlative rankings. Superlatives like “super” or “best.”
You may (or may not) be surprised to learn that the process by which these superlatives are placed is neither as objective nor as scientific as it might appear at first glance.
Let’s examine why.
Before you do, two caveats.
First, before you assume we’re just aggrieved hopefuls who didn’t get selected for these braces, know this: We’ve been invited to participate in the selection process, as well as solicited to buy ad space of one kind or another by the folks at marketing that publishes these lists. We have made the deliberate decision to refrain from participating. We’re pretty sure our clients think we’re good at what we do and that, for lack of a better term, it’s good enough for us.
Second, we are not smearing the lawyers involved in creating these lists. We don’t know all of them, but we do know a few, and almost all of those we do know would be considered good lawyers. Not “super” or “better”, just good, and we think that should be good enough for them, and more specifically, good enough for their customers.
After reading this, we hope you understand why we are not participating.
First of all (and you really should read this award more than once) these rankings are not based on customer testimonials or customer reviews; they are not based on customer input at all. In other words, no customer is asked to participate in these surveys. Not even a single one. We think this means it all starts with a shaky premise. For us, it’s like asking owners, cooks and servers to rate the restaurant they work at.
While all of its selection and ranking processes are labeled “rigorous” and “objective” by marketers, it’s really little more than a brother-in-law recommendation system.
If you network enough with other lawyers (read spend your time at lawyer functions or work at a large enough law firm), you’ll be able to get enough “peer recognition” (read make enough friends who are also lawyers) to not only to secure a nomination, but also to ensure that it leads to “qualification”.
Where does that rating lead?
Well, the marketing departments of the organizers and publishers of these rankings have the opportunity to increase sales of the “supers” and “best” with first-rate advertising space in their magazines and online directory services. That ad space is offered at a “preferred rate,” whatever that means.
The “super” and “best” lawyers get all their newly acquired status on their websites and emails too, so their prospective clients can see just how “good” they are.
However, at the end of the day, “super” and “best” are not necessarily “super” and “best” in the eyes of the people who really should be asked whether or not they are: that would be your clientele.
They are not nominated by the people for whom they work and for whom they are supposed to achieve results; rather, they are nominated by the people they work with, much like the cooks and servers we alluded to earlier.
We believe that practicing law is about helping our clients achieve their legal goals. We do not think that it is about seeking recognition from our professional competitors. And while we’re not saintly enough to refrain from any kind of marketing (in fact, you’ll find links to our website below this article), we think superlatives are a bit of a stretch.
Since lawyers often prosecute companies that engage in deceptive business practices, some of them would do well to apply a little more scrutiny in that regard to their own marketing practices.
We recognize that it is good to be well considered by other people and all that, for sure; particularly the people we are close to, such as friends, colleagues, and family. We’re just not too interested in impropriety, and polling our friends and colleagues to proclaim that we’re the “super” and the “best” seems a bit improper. We think there might be something in the ethical rules about it.
So for now, we’re happy to be “good,” and we’re even happier if our customers think we’re good, too.